Billions of people from all around the globe now have some sort of smart device which connects them to the internet.
Whether that be a smartphone, laptop, tablet, or even television, almost everyone on the planet now spends a few hours of the day scrolling through social media or the internet. The marketing industry has always been on top of human trends, and as a result, digital marketing is the newest form of effective advertising.
Digital marketing is now one of the biggest industries on the planet, as more and more companies are using techniques geared to target people while they are online. Learn about the evolution of the digital marketing industry below.
Where did Digital Marketing Start?
The first known iteration of some style of digital marketing dates all the way back to the 1990s when the digital age was starting to come into the effect, and the advent of the internet was becoming more popular in the everyday household.
The web 1.0 platform was extremely limited as users were only able to find information on the internet but could not watch videos, share pages, and everything we associate with internet scrolling today. However, in 1993, the first-ever clickable advertisement banner, purchased by HotWire, was launched on the internet, which opened up a massive door for what was to come, when the internet really exploded into popularity a decade later.
The Millennial Revolution
It cannot be argued that the generation that really grew up in the first-ever, true internet era was the millennials. They’ve grown up through the entire evolution of the internet from the small online database that we saw in the late 90s and early 2000s to the massive online world that we know and love today.
Digital marketing, as such, has, for the most part, been modeled around the wants and needs of millennials, even though now it is far more geared to gen Z. The millennial revolution allowed for an entirely new economic bubble to start growing, with most people from this generation learning to do their shopping online and spending many hours of the day on their mobile devices. This saw the digital marketing industry expand massively.
The Present Mobile Era
The mobile era and the late 2010s saw the e-commerce industry explode into life, with Amazon surpassing over $10 billion in online sales. This made it more than clear that online shopping, digital marketing, and the internet era were here to stay and that there was real money to be made in the industry.
Mobile app culture also massively contributed to the rise of digital marketing as social media apps like Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat provided advertisers with fantastic platforms to market their brands to consumers.
The Bottom Line
In the present day, over 65% of a person’s online time is spent on a mobile phone, and the average person spends around 4-5 hours a day doing everything from reading emails to looking at NFL picks. This has allowed the digital marketing industry to grow and expand massively over the past decade.
